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The SEAD Project to Transition to National Data Service Consortium Resource July 2017

Posted on:

May 1, 2017

SEAD’s cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation’s DataNet program is scheduled to end on June 30, 2017. Over the five years of the project, we built infrastructure that allows researchers to more easily manage, interpret, curate, share, and publish their data. In that time, we have worked with dozens of researchers, supported over30 Project Spaces with hundreds of thousands of files, and helpedpublish over 40 datasets totaling more than 2 TB to SEAD Partner Repositories. In cooperation with the National Data Service Consortium (NDS), SEAD will continue to be available as a resource for sharing and publishing scientific data. The NDS builds on data archiving and sharing efforts by connecting them together with a common set of tools to better facilitate data search, publication, linking, and reuse. Several members of the SEAD team have been active in the NDS consortium, and we are very pleased for SEAD to continue as part of that emerging infrastructure.

As we approach this time of transition, we would like to bring to your attention the following:

User Support

Beginning July 2017, user support will transition to assistance with bugs and system errors. Users should contact support+sead@nationaldataservice.org to report bugs,operational issues with SEAD2 Project Spaces, or issues with SEAD publishing services. Help documentation andFAQs will continue to be available via SEAD’s website.

Your Data

Current users will be able to access their project’s data in Project Spaces for an indefinite period of time. However, should you choose to migrate your data and metadata to a different platform, the SEAD team will assist you with migration or downloading your data provided you contact us no later than May 15, 2017. The Curbee suite of tools for publishing data will continue to be available on an as-is and best effort basis via GitHub and through the NDS Labs Workbench. Discovery and availability through the SEAD Virtual Archive member node of DataONE will continue to be available on a best effort basis beyond the June 30, 2017 date.

Project Spaces

SEAD Project Spaces will continue to be available, thanks to the partnership with the NDS, and users are welcome to upload data and create new Project Spaces in SEAD2.

The long-term sustainability of data archived in a SEAD Partner Repository is subject to that repository’s terms and will be unaffected by the end of the SEAD core effort. Current partner repositories are: openICPSR, IDEALS, and IU SEAD Cloud (SDA).

Install SEAD

SEAD provides self-service capabilities through a highly scalable suite of hosted services. In the next few weeks, we will release a fully-documented package of SEAD’s open source code. Interested institutions can install SEAD as an extensible toolkit or a hosted service to be used by their research communities and further build upon it.

Seeking Collaboration

We seek new collaborations and partnerships for continuing to build on SEAD services. Interested to learn more? Contact SEAD at SEADdatanet@umich.edu for more information on these opportunities.

Connect with SEAD

SEAD services are offered as a resource through the National Data Service Consortium (NDS). The SEAD project was funded by the National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement #OCI0940824 from 2011 to 2017.